Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • Fighting piracy by shooting yourself in the foot, #3124

    Ars Technica:

    High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

    Engadget:

    the problem comes in when you realize that the new unibody machines don’t offer a VGA / VGA-to-component output, meaning that you have to connect it to an HDCP-compliant display if you want to see anything. We know, one word in particular keeps coming to mind to describe this fiasco: awesome.

    As one Engadget commenter puts it:

    Seriously, if you pirate it, it JUST WORKS. No need to spend extra to comply with DRM/HDCP crap.

  • “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

    Not everybody in marketing sees the entire world as an advertising opportunity, it seems. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Procter & Gamble’s GM for interactive marketing and innovation, Ted McConnell, isn’t keen on Facebook ads.

    Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.

  • Newspapers: firing the wrong people?

    There’s an interesting piece by David Carr in today’s New York Times about (US) newspapers’ latest cost-cutting wheeze: firing their best writers.

    Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business.

    …Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.

    I’m inclined to agree with this bit too:

    I have always thought of journalism as more craft than profession and tell students that it is the accumulation of experience and technique that makes a journalist valuable, not some ineffable beckoning of the muse.

  • Dead Space (Xbox 360)

    I’ve mentioned this game a couple of times now, but now that I’ve actually finished it (on the easiest level, naturally – I’m rubbish at games) I thought I’d do a quick review. Why? The timing of its release was terrible: instead of shining like an oasis during the summer games drought, a period so bad that people (well, me) spent hard-earned cash on crap such as Fracture because there was sod-all out, it came out just as big hitters such as Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3 were on their way to the shelves – which means there’s a good chance it’ll be overlooked. That’d be a shame, because it’s the most fun I’ve had with a game for ages.

    Reviews have said it’s derivative, which it is: a lot of Alien, a bit of Doom and a soupcon of Prey. They’ve said it flags a bit in the middle, which it does. They’ve suggested that the story is a bit rubbish, which it is. And they’ve said the scares are of the simplest, open a box, AAARGH MONSTER kind. Which is a wee bit unfair.

    There are indeed plenty of open a box, AAARGH MONSTER scares in the game, but what Dead Space is really good at is establishing a constant feeling of dread. Imagine your testicles were filled with explosives, and the explosives were really quite volatile, and you’re on a bus being driven by an idiot, and it turns onto a cobbled street, and there are lots of holes in the ground, and the driver speeds up, and you know that sooner or later your balls are going to blow up. You know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen.

    Dead Space is a bit like that. But with AAARGH MONSTERS instead of balls.

    It’s not a 10/10 game by any means, and it’s not a 9/10 either, so if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t buy anything unless Edge has okayed it then you might not bother. But it’s worth getting hold of pre-owned, or when it hits the bargain rails, or on eBay, because it’s about ten hours of solid entertainment. It’s the game I’d hoped Doom 3 would be – dumb, derivative, gory fun.

  • HD video cameras: as long as tech is this confusing, we’ll need people to cut through the bullshit

    A while back, I mentioned that taking baby steps into “proper” photography made me weep hot salty tears of frustration and rage, until a bit of informed advice and a few magazines cheered me up and translated the crap into plain English. It turns out that the world of digital photography is the simplest thing in the world compared to video.

    It’s entirely academic at the moment – I’ll probably have to mug some schoolchildren at lunchtime in order to afford a pint or two tonight – but at some point in the near future I want to buy a video camera. I’ve learnt from my previous mistakes – best summarised as “don’t buy on price” – and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want.

    It’s not complicated. I want a camera that has these features:

    * High definition, because if I’m going to shell out on a camera I might as well get one that’s reasonably future-proof.

    * Card storage, because I hate DVDs and like the security of being able to carry a few spare cards around.

    * Mac compatibility.

    And naturally, I don’t want to pay a million pounds for it. Even window shopping is suffering from the credit crunch.

    So off I trot to the wonderful world of manufacturer websites and product spec sheets. And what a confusing load of crap it all is.

    In no particular order, here are some of the things you need to know about:

    * HD means different things depending on what you’re looking at. This camera here is HD, with 720p HD! This camera here is also HD, but it has 1080p HD! But this 720p one has better pictures than the 1080p because it has better fps and that one is better than the other ones because it is not interlaced and over here this one is the very bestest camera ever because it has magic space pixies that live inside it!

    * The jargon around video cameras is even worse than with still cameras. In addition to all the f-stop stuff and JPEG profiles you’d expect, there’s CMOS and CCD and 3DDNR and BIONZ image processors and X many frames per second and face detection and AVC/H.264 and DIS and OIS and OMGWTFINEEDALIEDOWN.

    * It’s not enough to go “no, Sony, your memory sticks are evil” and plump for something that uses SD cards. Different cameras have different levels of SD support, so some max out at a particular level of storage, others are utterly pointless unless you get SDHC cards. And of those, some of them don’t really work unless you go for Class 4 HD cards. Class what?

    * Mac compatible doesn’t necessarily mean Mac compatible, because the combination of the highest HD resolutions and the AVCHD format used by some cameras isn’t yet supported by OS X software such as iMovie (although this may have changed by now. I’m too confused to keep looking).

    Kudos to Techradar*, T3**, the Guardian*** et al for trying to explain all this stuff sensibly in reviews and product comparisons, but I can’t help thinking that this is the best option:

    * Instead of buying an HD camera, take lots of still photos, print them out and wave them around really, really quickly.

    * Vested interest: I write for it, albeit not about video cameras
    ** Vested interest: I’ve written for it, albeit not about video cameras
    *** Vested interest: I’ve written for that too, albeit.. you get the idea

  • New Sony Reader e-book: better, still not perfect

    According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader:

    Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and read books we’ve seen so far. Alas, its lesser contrast doesn’t warm our bookish hearts, and for those in love with e-ink’s paper-like look, that’s a tough one to swallow. For those new to eBook readers or those who don’t mind reading from matte notebook displays, the PRS-700 has greater appeal. As always, the Reader is a great way to carry around a huge library of books and avoid the storage issues of traditional books.

    I was actually playing with the current model yesterday, and while it’s a lovely wee gadget it’s still not the right reader for me. What I want is the Reader’s form factor with the iPhone’s wireless and two apps: NetNewsWire and Instapaper. That’d work.

    As Engadget says:

    with no wireless of any sort you’re stuck filling this one via USB, SD, or MS Duo. In other words there’s still no perfect choice in the world of the e-ink reader — but it is awfully hard to ignore the Reader’s sleek exterior when compared to the Kindle’s distinctively sci-fi doorstop look.

  • Buying a camcorder? Don’t get a Panasonic

    I bought a video camera just before Baby Bigmouth turned up – a Panasonic VDR-D250. I wasn’t greatly bothered about specs, so I quickly checked that it was Mac compatible before buying it.

    It turns out that it *was* Mac compatible, sort of, on the day I bought it. A few weeks later Leopard came out, and my camera was no longer Mac-compatible.

    Unlike many cameras (including most other Panasonics), my camera is only Mac compatible via Panasonic’s bundled software, which doesn’t work with Leopard and which hasn’t been updated since before Leopard shipped. That means it’s only able to communicate with OS X if you finalise the discs (in the case of DVD-RWs) and get it to act like an external DVD player, and even then iMovie chokes on the files. If you’re using DVD-R things are worse still, because OS X doesn’t like the .vro file format unless you shell out extra cash on the Quicktime MPEG Component – a prerequisite not just for QuickTime, but for other OS X video programs such as MPEG Streamclip.

    Luckily for me I’ve got a copy of Toast, the all-singing, all-dancing OS X video software, and that can convert pretty much anything to pretty much anything. Otherwise I’d be scunnered.

    I’m serious about not buying Panasonic, though. This is a camera that only came out in late Spring 2006, and which cost around £500 at launch. If a firm can’t be arsed ensuring that fairly pricey hardware stays current for 18 months, it doesn’t deserve your money.

  • Amazon’s experimental interface: WindowShop

    A few months back I blogged about a tech demo that made browsing Amazon more shop-like. It seems Amazon spotted it too, because its new WindowShop interface does much the same thing.

    I’m not sure it’s actually useful (at least on a PC – it would probably make more sense on a TV), but it does look pretty.

  • Sage advice for astronauts

    If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft spookily orbiting above them, stop communicating is because they’ve been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters. This is scientific fact.

    Eurogamer reviews sci-fi horror game Dead Space.

  • Blackberry Storm: better than the iPhone?

    If you do a lot of typing, it could well be.

    the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motion’s first attempt at a touchscreen device, is a triumph. It’s a really powerful device with plenty of clever features, but let’s set that to one side for the moment and focus on the question people really want to know the answer to: what’s it like to type on?

    A revelation, is the short answer. RIM has managed to develop a touch-screen keyboard that’s as close to typing on real buttons as you’re currently likely to get. Every time you touch a key, the whole screen feels like it’s pressing down under the weight of your finger, and a sharp clicking sound is emitted. You can switch between a full Qwerty keyboard layout in portrait or landscape mode, or opt for BlackBerry’s SureType keyboard configuration (where two letters appear in a single Qwerty keyboard button), and best of all, you can copy and paste between applications – a simple feature sorely lacking on Apple’s iPhone and many other touchscreen devices.